Sunday, January 31, 2010

The angry and unhinged Tea Party folks will gather in Nashville for a convention next week, full of piss and vinegar.

Having an unusually loose grip on reality, the TP people can be counted upon to make outlandish claims about almost everything and scream really loudly.

Unsurprisingly, planning for the Nashville convention isn't going well. Some of the True Believers are fighting with other True Believers. Meanwhile, some of the Tea Party Stars are bailing out. Example: Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann, one of the silliest of the GOP extremists.

Sticking with the plan: half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

NPR has an interesting report on the Tea Party's many problems. The story, in print and audio, can be found here.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Howard Zinn, radical historian, died this week. Zinn was the author of A People's History of the United States, a book that dared to tell the story of the nation by looking at ordinary people and the grassroots, not the high and mighty.

Just think: A scholar who told the story of the U.S. from the point of view of working folks and outsiders.

Celebrating the little guy—what a concept. You might even call it democratic. Read the tribute from Mother Joneshere.

Speaking of drama (see previous post about August: Osage County), we also made it out to Tulsa's art house theater, Circle Cinema, for A Single Man, the directorial debut of clothing designer Tom Ford.

In a sentence, A Single Man is about the day in the life of a gay English professor after the death of his partner in Los Angeles in 1962. British actor Colin Firth stars; his performance is lovely and carefully controlled. It's little wonder that he won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for this role.

The movie is visually seductive, too, with Firth and co-star Julianne Moore as lonely souls longing for meaning and feeling among the wreckage of their lives.

We didn't know Tom Ford or his clothes before this movie, but based on his stellar direction of this film, we'd like to know more about his clothes. We also hope he makes more movies.

We braved the snow and ice Friday night to attend the Tulsa PAC performance of August: Osage County, the powerful and funny family drama by Oklahoma native Tracy Letts.

The play was worth the white-knuckle drive.

The fictional Pawhuska family is by turns terrifying and hilarious, giving audiences a range of powerful issues and ideas to consider. Among other themes, Letts is concerned with questions about the meaning of family, love, loyalty, and truth.

In short, there's enough emotion and human frailty here to keep even the skeptical playgoers entertained and challenged, which is no small achievement.

The play continues tonight and Sunday, with two shows. And if you're lucky, the roads will be much improved.

Note: The play is "no holds barred," which means that those audience members with genteel Oklahoma ears may be offended by some of the language.

Sen. Jim Inhofe is nobody's idea of a statesman. If he has a civil bone in his body, he's kept it well hidden for years.

So it is no surprise that the former Tulsa mayor (sad, we know…) plays political games whenever he can. Speaking to KRMG about the president's State of the Union speech, for instance, Inhofe didn't bother to think about the president's policies in a serious way.

Instead, he offered a hack attack, arguing that Obama is a really good liar. That's Inhofe's idea of leadership, apparently. As we said, Inhofe is not a statesman, or even a thoughtful politician. This the guy, after all, who brought Dick "Chicken Hawk" Cheney to Tulsa for a fundraiser.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

You may have heard about last week's Supreme Court decision (a 5-4 vote) striking down bans on corporate money in election campaigns.

The reason this decision is getting a lot of bad press is because it seems to tilt the playing field in electoral politics to corporations, which have big money and the will to spend it to get what they want from favored politicians—and punish those who won't play ball with corporate power.

Writing in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus has blasted the decision, taking apart its numerous errors. Here's the opening paragraph:

In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.

How do you know when Rush Limbaugh is lying? When he's moving his lips.

Sure, it's an old joke, but in Limbaugh's case, it's more accurate than not. The latest made-up crapola from El Rushbo has to do with giving to Haiti, which Limbaugh seems to think is some sort of Left-wing conspiracy.

He said recently that giving aid through the White House website would entail extra overhead costs. PolitiFact checked out the claim and —guess what?—it's wrong. Who coulda guessed it?

PolitiFact awarded Limbaugh its Pants on Fire award for making stuff up. Good work, Rush.

Poorly informed, superficially educated and tied to a host of failed theories and weak ideas—yet never doubtful of his ability—Bush started an elective war, sanctioned policies of torture and increased government secrecy and presided over a major economic collapse.

Despite that record, the Right has continued to insist that Bush was a triumphant leader who stood tall when the chips were down. To hear the GOP spinners tell it, W. saved the nation from all sorts of external and internal evils.

On the one-year anniversary of Bush leaving office, the Right has gone into full nostalgia mode, recalling the triumphs that never were, desperately trying to save a ship (the Bush Administration) that has already sunk.

Our friends at Media Matters have complied a list of Glorious GOP Nostalgia, complete with heroic tales and misremembered facts. Read more here.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Regular readers of AT know that we have been students of Iraq war literature, paging our way through a number of books and memoirs by soldiers and journalists. (See our Alternative Reading category below.)

Today we'd like to add a film to our Iraq war curriculum. The film isThe Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's gritty tale of an army team that defuses the deadly IEDs, aka roadside bombs. (The film is still playing at Southroads AMC 20 in Tulsa.)

We can't say the film is exactly fun. It's not. But it is realistic and harrowing and, for this reason, an important film, one that shows how terrible and seductive war can be.

Quoting the writer Chris Hedges, the movie opens by noting that "war is a drug." Bigelow, one of the rising women directors in Hollywood, keeps the camera moving throughout the story, a way of communicating the adrenalin thrill of combat.

Bigelow also focuses on the faces of the protagonists, showing the grime and the sweat and the sheer terror of modern warfare. It's macho stuff—enough like real combat to shake up the most complacent among us.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Some folks love her, but ex-Gov. Sarah Palin is not as beloved as conventional wisdom would have you believe.

A new CBS poll shows that support for a Palin presidential bid is thin. Of course, the good people of Red State America still maintain that Palin is The Savior of the Right, notwithstanding repeated evidence of her lighter-than-air intellectual heft.

Just about a year ago, Tulsa blogger and Urban Tulsa Weekly columnist Michael Bates blasted the Tulsa World for playing fast and loose with its circulation figures.

Among other things Bates charged that the newspaper had not been audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation for nearly a decade and that the paper's circulation was 20 percent higher in 2005 than it was in 2006.

The World was not amused, filing a libel lawsuit against UTW and Bates. Urban Tulsa quickly retracted these and other charges, but Bates did not—at least at first. On his blog, Batesline, Bates stood behind his column.

By mid-February, however, Bates capitulated. He admitted his mistakes and the lawsuit was dropped.

In his "To whom it may concern letter," Bates included some very interesting words and phrases regarding his column, including these: "numerous errors," "false," "regret and retract," "unfounded," "inaccurate and misleading," "incorrect," ""absolutely no evidence," "false and inaccurate," and "retract those incorrect statements."

Thursday, January 14, 2010

The wacky folks over at Urban Tulsa Weekly (yawn) have complied their annual list of Tulsa movers and shakers. They call it, somewhat optimistically, the Hot 100.

It's a silly exercise, of course, and one fraught with hazards. First, the number is arbitrary. Second, the definition of "hot" so vague as to be meaningless. Third, the selection process itself is unclear and well hidden.

Given these problems, it's no wonder the Hot 100 list is uneven, to put it mildly.

First, some winners:

We like some of the art and cultural names, including Clark Weins of Circle Theater fame and Lisa Regan, the Garden Deva. We also like some of the civic folks UTW names, such as George Kaiser,Susan Neal, and The People Who Run the Local Farmers Markets.

Then there are UTW's highly dubious selections:

Terry Simonson, Mayor Dewey Bartlett's chief of staff. Last time we checked, Simonson was making more than the mayor. Oops. Then there's the fact that Simonson used to write columns for—you guessed it—UTW.

Speaking of writing for UTW, the paper also puffed another of its former columnists,Michael Bates, author of the Batesline blog. Isn't this the same guy who got UTW sued last year? And caused UTW to publicly apologize? Oh, right, he's the one.

Then there's part-time pol Chris Medlock. We can't quite fathom how Medlock is "hot." After all, he's been losing in politics (to Dewey Bartlett in the GOP primary for mayor) and employment (lost his job at KFAQ radio). Not much a track record here.

Finally, UTWonce again nominated its own founder, Keith Skrzypczak, as a Hot 100 member. The staff has done this before, which does nothing to improve the reputation or credibility of UTW. (Yawn.)

Rev. Pat Robertson—the chief pontificator at The 700 Club—is simply amazing. When bad things happen, he can talk to God and then tell the rest of us why the Lord did what He did.

Hurricane Katrina happened to New Orleans because those folks were Big Time Sinners, Rev. Pat has said.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the Lord told Pat's pal Jerry Falwell (and Rev. Pat agreed) that the attack was all the ACLU's fault. After all, those liberal lawyers keep supporting things like civil rights and free expression and porn and gay stuff. So icky!

Now that an earthquake has killed many thousands of innocent people in Haiti, Rev. Pat says that God told him that He did it because the evil Haitians were in league with the Devil. And then there's France, which has something to do with Satan as well.

Fascinating. Incredible. Literally unbelievable. Read all about it here, with enlightening video.

No one ever said Sarah Palin was the brightest crayon in the box. There's a reason for that, of course, which became painfully obvious today as the half-term governor of Alaska joined the Fox News team.

With a straight face and no sense of irony, Palin explained that the people just love Fox News because it's so fair and balanced, unlike the biased actual news media.

Of course.

As Stephen Colbert has proclaimed while channeling the American Right, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

To put it another way, the mainstream media reports facts, while Fox and the conservative media reports news that people already agree with, factual or not.

That may make conservative viewers happy (the real Fox objective being profits, not truth), but it's hardly fair or balanced, a slogan so warped as to be meaningless.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Never underestimate the cynicism and silliness of Fox News, which today announced the hiring of its newest and lightest political commentator, the half-term former Alaska governor, one Sarah Palin.

Despite abundant evidence of Palin's incompetence and general ignorance on matters large and small, Fox News couldn't resist. Of course not. With her dazzling smile and "you betcha" spirit, Fox viewers will be swept away by the newest Empty Head on the Right.

All of which provides more proof that Fox isn't (and never was) a serious news operation. Clearly, Fox News is more interested in pumping up the Republican Party than anything else.

In honor of this occasion, our friends at Talking Points Memo have complied a highlight reel of Sarah moments of the past year. The amazing video is here.

Fox News anchor Brit Hume might want to rethink his recent advice to Tiger Woods. Hume, you may recall, recently advised Tiger to give up Buddhism (Tiger's a Buddhist?) and convert to Christianity.

The pundits are having a field day, of course, since the recent record of high profile Christians involved in sex scandals is long and impressive.

Let's see: There's Rev. Ted Haggard, Sen. David Vitter, Sen. John Ensign, and Gov. Mark Sanford, just to get started.

The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen has weighed in as well. Read Benen's posting on The Political Animalhere.

UPDATE: One wag we heard noted that Hume's pro-Christian advice was based mostly on Christianity's purported good deal, the idea that Christianity gives sinners like Woods a "get out of jail free card." Looked at in that light, Hume's advice is even stranger than first supposed.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

The most unpopular national politician of the last decade—Dick Cheney—has come out of hiding once again in order to lie about President Obama.

This time Cheney is claiming that Obama is soft on terrorism, so soft, in fact, that Obama won't admit the nation is a war. Too bad it's a completely bogus claim, as PolitiFact has documented.

In fact, PolitiFact found numerous instances of Obama saying exactly what Cheney says Obama hasn't said, earning the former VP a dishonorable "Pants on Fire" award for lying.

We don't mind Cheney criticizing at the president. All politicians criticize their opponents. But we do object to fabrications and lies, which seem to be standard operating procedure for Cheney and many others on the Right.

Here's the conclusion of the PolitiFact analysis:

[E]ven a cursory examination of Obama's statements shows this one is preposterous. Obama has often said the United States is at war against terrorist organizations -- and has ordered a massive increase in U.S. troops in Afghanistan to fight that war. So Cheney's comment isn't just False, it's ridiculously so. Pants on Fire!

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Air America commentator Ron Reagan—really!—has summed up the year in Right-wing Nonsense. To the surprise of absolutely no thinking person, the Conservative Idiots have been working overtime to debase their cause by lying and deception.

Here's a bit of the Reagan commentary:

It's been a banner year for conservative idiocy. The ranters, the haters, the bigots, the self-loathing closet cases and prattling greed-heads were all out in force. They'll be back again next year--you can count on it. As long as there's money to be made peddling crap, crap peddlers won't go away. And they're taking no prisoners...

The AT crew is dedicated to the facts. We like to think that there is actual evidence in the political world, and that adherence to the facts is one of the glories of American political discourse.

Not everyone follows this notion. Indeed, there's a whole industry (talk radio, Fox News, etc.) built on political lies, distortions, half-truths, deliberate misinterpretations and the like. For this crowd, facts are hardly necessary.

Just make stuff up—the ditto-heads will believe whatever you tell them.

Which brings us to one of the best practitioners of Right-wing deception and nonsense, Ann Coulter. Her latest whopper: Obama's madrassa education, a lie she repeated earlier this week.

Of course: Obama is a secret Muslim (or something) who will soon force us (yes, he's a secret Fascist too) all to give up Christianity (which he secretly hates).

It's nuts, of course, but the Right loves to demonize its enemies, even when they have to make up lies to do it. Check out the details here.